The Policy Exchange
report on northern cities has thrust the world of think-tanks into the spotlight—I’ll stand a round for any reader who can tell me when the last time the
Daily Mirror devoted its lead editorial to a think-tank report was—and there has been a lot of talk about Policy Exchange’s relationship with the Tories but it is worth noting that the think tanks the Tories work with are more diverse than you might think.
Jonathan Isaby pointed out yesterday that George Osborne is to deliver an agenda-setting speech at Demos, which was New Labour’s favourite think-tank back in the day. But that not’s the half of the relationship between the Tory Treasury team and Demos. The two sides have been holding joint seminars on the
‘post-bureaucratic age’, one of the key Cameroon concepts.
Demos is not the only centre-left think-tank the Tories are working with. They are also doing work on defining social value—how do you measure the importance of social capital etc—with the Social Market Foundation whose director recently left to go and work for John Denham.
I think there are a couple of reasons why people outside the Westminster Village should care about all this. First, it shows how the ideological dividing lines in this era are not yet clearly defined. Second, it illustrates how the political weather has changed: the Tories are now making the intellectual running and people want to make contacts with the Tories now because they believe that they will be in power after the next election.
